


i cannot lift you from my skin

by Wren_Song



Category: The Hunger Games
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-14
Updated: 2013-03-18
Packaged: 2017-12-05 01:42:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/717417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wren_Song/pseuds/Wren_Song
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cato and Clove are the Victors of the 74th Hunger Games. Nothing is like it was supposed to be, but revolution is harder to kill than two children.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. heartless

**Author's Note:**

> This work includes a traumatic brain injury and the aftereffects of that. Since the Tributes of District 2 aren't likely to be medically sophisticated, these aftereffects aren't described in precise medical terms. There are also ableist overtones, because Panem is not exactly an egalitarian place. Please be warned. 
> 
> Also, uh, violence.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cato and Clove are the Victors of the 74th Hunger Games. Nothing is like it was supposed to be, but revolution is harder to kill than two children.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This work includes a traumatic brain injury and the aftereffects of that. Since the Tributes of District 2 aren't likely to be medically sophisticated, these aftereffects aren't described in precise medical terms. There are also ableist overtones, because Panem is not exactly an egalitarian place. Please be warned.
> 
> Also, uh, violence.

Clove kicks dirt over the fire at the mouth of the Cornucopia. 

“Are we done?” Cato asks her, and he sounds—tired. They’re both tired. When was the last time he slept? She’s been awake longer, but she is past tiredness, she is into some other spectrum of sensitivity where every sound is cut glass and the edges of her eyes are prisms. Or that’s the head injury. She is missing three teeth, she has a broken arm, she is swollen and bloody all over and can’t tell anymore how much of it is hers and how much of it belongs to other people.

She looks up at the sky, waiting to be told they cannot have what District 12 stole with their idiotic false romance. Waiting to be told, no, all your life is not enough, all your glory and passion is not enough, you have still not given enough to slake our need. This is not fair. This has not been fair since 12 stole her year. 

“Maybe,” she says, after a time.

The hovercraft comes. Clove does not kill Cato. Cato does not kill Clove. 

Until they are both on stage being interviewed Clove still doesn’t quite believe it.

*

Victory is blurred and tarnished by the ghosts of 12, but this is the thing: Clove knows it won’t last. She remembers the darlings of other years who died. None of it matters if you lose. They are dressed like polished steel, unburned, and they are fierce in their triumph. They are not expected to be in love. They are comrades-in-arms, they are pure, they are the reckoning angels of these games. 

(Clove is sick, sick all the time. She has migraines that make her vomit and scream, that make her slam her head against the floor. Cato cannot bend the fingers on his right hand. But forget that. Forget everything except that they’ve brought home the only dual victory in the Games’ history, they proved they were the best. 

Remember: that used to be important.)

*

“And how did you feel when you made the Game-winning move?”

Remember: Peeta Mellark was not the funny, charming, scared boy she felt just a little bit sorry for. Remember: Peeta was just an obstacle between her and this. Remember: what she felt was not regret, it was glory. They may have tasted the same in her mouth, but they are not the same. It is very important to maintain clarity. 

Clove flashes her brilliant teeth in nothing like a smile and tells Panem that she felt like a Victor, and it’s the right answer. 

Maybe the Districts regret Peeta. But they don’t matter. All that matters is that President Snow settles a crown on her head after Cato and tells her, also with nothing like a smile, that she is a good girl. 

History is easily revised. The rule was for them in the first place. Katniss and Peeta are edited into footnotes, into District 12 Male and Female. If the Capitol can believe this so can they, she tells herself as she eats small dry crackers. So can they, so can they. In six months no one will remember anything else. 

Cato raises her right hand in his left as they step off the train and under a marble archway gleaming in the daylight, and Clove bites her tongue bloody trying not to flinch at the brightness. Her eyes shine as flat and dead as diamonds.

*

“How’s your head?”

“The same.”

They don’t lie to each other. They never did. Cato sits on the edge of her impossibly wide bed and holds her limp hand. 

“My mother invited you to dinner tonight.”

Most of the time Clove wants to scream. This time, she does. Cato captures her clumsily in his arms (clumsily, because he doesn’t want to hurt her, and they do not know how to touch people without hurting them and it just makes it all worse) and rocks her like an infant. Squeezes her hand like he did when he was telling her that she couldn’t go, not when they were so close, just stay. Just stay. 

“No,” she says, viciously, and bites him, because what else can she do? What else does she know how to do? His blood floods her mouth and he doesn’t make a sound.

“I can’t do this without you,” he says, quietly, when he’s bandaging his wound one-handed because she’s certainly not going to do anything about it. “Just come. You have to get strong again.”

“I have brain damage.” She’s snarling, and it feels good. It feels right to finally spit this at someone, when she’s had to be so careful for such a long time. She knows her house is bugged, and she really doesn’t care. Let them listen. “I’m not going to get better. You should have let me die, Cato. You made us look weak. You made us look like Twelve.”

When he moves to grab her she rolls off the bed and disappears underneath it, only to have him grab her ankles and yank her out roughly. They struggle for almost a minute on the floor before he can pin her face-to-face. He’s always had the ground advantage.

“Don’t you ever say that again,” he says, shaking her to underscore his point, and she winces when her head bounces off even the soft carpet, “Don’t.”

Clove is iron, she is granite. The most emotion she ever shows is sharp barbs of anger, but ever since the rock fragmented her skull (and she can’t remember being hit, or what happened after, except that when her eyes could focus he was there, and had she really screamed his name?) she hasn’t felt anything right. So that’s why she’s crying. The doctors said it was emotional instability, and that is the only reason she’s crying.

It doesn’t explain why looks like he might too, but who said it was a perfect science?

*

Cato and Clove don’t have to pretend to be in love, and they aren’t in love anyway, so it works out. Cato has his own things to remember while he watches Clove eat and ignores the throbbing in his shoulder. In training, they said to try not to get bitten, because human mouths are filthy. But this isn’t the Arena. If he gets sick, someone will make him better.

(But they can’t fix Clove, and they can’t fix his hand. So why does he believe they can fix anything that matters?)

What they have is better than love. It’s stronger. It must be, because they’re both alive. 

Cato likes being a Victor. He likes his new house. He likes being able to eat whatever he wants and sleep whenever he wants. In theory, at least, because he still sleeps and wakes at exactly the same times he did in the training centre, and he still eats like a machine taking in fuel. He likes the attention and the wealth. Most of all, he likes the glory. People look at him with awe, with more respect than he’s ever had directed at him in his life. 

He did everything anyone ever wanted him to, and more. So now is when the happiness is supposed to start.

Watching Clove eat, struggling almost invisibly to make her jaw work correctly, he tells himself that happiness is going to start any minute now. This minute, or the next. 

Soon.

*

Maybe her eyes are the color of lapis lazuli.

Cato doesn’t have many hobbies, except his supposed ‘talent’ of stonecarving. So he’s trying to figure out what color Clove’s eyes actually are. He thinks he can make something out of it. They’re not sapphire, they’re not turquoise, and they’re not agate. He’s not entirely sure why he wants to make her something, or why it should be the same color as her eyes, but it occupies his time. He needs something to do while he waits.

“Why didn’t you tell me it was like this?” He asks Julian. Just once. He’s drunk for the first time in his life, and his Mentor looks at him dispassionately. But Julian has never looked at him with anything but distance, even when Cato won, and Cato is done trying to figure out why that is. It doesn’t actually matter, does it? Nothing has mattered very much since the Arena.

“You wouldn’t have tried as hard.” Julian takes the bottle from his hand and pauses. “You should have killed her, you know.”

Cato gets one hit in before Julian slams his head against the wall. After that he’s too dizzy to stand up properly. They don’t talk about it after that. Cato knows better than to ask questions, most of the time. The answers are never what you want to hear.

Her eyes are almost definitely lapis lazuli. 

Maybe he should have killed her.

*

Clove lives alone. Cato is surrounded by family. 

He doesn’t remember her ever having a family. He never knew her that well until the last year of training, until they were both under consideration as Tributes. He had seen her before, though, a little girl with little knives and red ribbons in her hair. If she ever had one, she doesn’t say. He doesn’t ask.

Sometimes he envies her aloneness. He barely even knows his family. They’re strangers who look like him and crowd his house. And they’re afraid of him. They don’t have to say they are. Cato recognizes fear when he sees it. They all flinch when he moves silent and fast, shrink away when he comes inside sweating and flushed from sword practice. He doesn’t know how he feels about that.

She isn’t afraid of him. She was never of afraid him, even in the Arena. Almost everyone is afraid of him except for her. 

He goes to her house and works on outrageously expensive stone in her basement. He doesn’t even bother knocking. She always knows when he’s there, and sometimes she comes down to watch. They sit in silence and floating stone dust, never needing to speak. She knows him like the weight of her knives; he knows her like a map of his scars.

He probably should have killed her, but he can’t stop being glad he didn’t. 

*

By the time the Victory Tour comes, Clove is a little better. It crept up on her. She’s hitting almost half of the targets in front of her now. She practices alone, so no one knows she made progress, or that she ever lost her aim in the first place. It’s probably not the best kept secret in the world, but she feels entitled to some pride. 

Everyone in Twelve hates them. Clove made her stylist put her in black and white feathers, just for this stop. She hates them all too. There’s a boy in the crowd she’s sure would try to kill her if he could. She almost wants him to try. She wants to kill everyone in front of her. She wants to cut the face off of Katniss Everdeen’s little sister slowly. (She doesn’t actually know what she wants, except to hurt someone.)

Cato breaks her little finger when she starts shaking, to keep her focused. 

She says: “District 12 has always been an essential part of our great nation.”

She says: “And so, we are honored to be here.”

She says, when she should be finished, when the speech is supposed to be over and done with: “Peeta Mellark was a credit to your District.”

She doesn’t know why she says that last one. 

*

What was there to know about Katniss Everdeen? She was sullen and stupid. Clove never saw what was that impressive about her. Plenty of poorer District Tributes have managed not to die immediately. If Glimmer hadn’t fallen asleep they would have killed her at that tree. That wasn’t Clove’s fault. And if Thresh hadn’t misunderstood showmanship as some kind of admission of guilt—like he was so innocent—she would have died at the Feast. That one was barely Clove’s fault. Mostly, Katniss Everdeen was lucky, and she loved her sister. That’s all. If loving your family and being lucky makes a person special, well. Clove would like to make a few nominations herself. 

But Peeta Mellark was a good person. 

Clove wonders what saying that, what knowing that will cost her. She thinks of what she has to lose, which is nothing. She has no friends. She has no family. There’s Cato, but Cato said only what he was supposed to. Also, they should know better than to think she’d care very much one way or another if they hurt him. Pain is their first language. Pain is just weakness trying to get out of your skin. It’d almost be funny if they tried that.

Almost. Almost.

In the end, nothing happens. In fact, her stylist says it was a canny move. It eases some of the leftover unease the Capitol felt with them, that Clove can be so gracious. After all, no one can argue that Peeta was brave. It makes her seem more human. It makes her dress of feathers seem like a gift instead of an insult. Likeability has always been her weak point, so this, in the end, is a good thing. Apparently.

She breaks little things in the train wherever she can. Small enough not to be noticed right away, but important enough to be noticed eventually. She hates them all. She hates them for not caring, for not thinking she could be dangerous anymore, even though she has no real desire to be some kind of martyr. Clove has seen what happens to martyrs. She may not care much about the Capitol, but she is loyal to her District. It’s just that she wants whatever this flicker inside of her is to be recognized.

They burned Katniss and Peeta together. They were already dead. It was just that a certain point had to be made. In training, they learned dramatics with combat. She knows all about catharsis. Victory depends on it. So they gave them real fire.

It’s still burning low in her throat. 

In 11 she wears slate grey and keeps her eyes up, because she has nothing for them.

*

Clove’s words spark nothing in Cato besides surprise, but if she feels that way about an idiot who died for an ugly girl then he supposes that’s her business. He doesn’t have anything to say himself. There’s no one he killed he feels like honoring. The only one who might have been worthwhile was Thresh, but then he hurt Clove, and Cato will carry that hatred with him for the rest of his life. 

It doesn’t occur to him to feel guilt over their deaths, so he can’t explain the heaviness in his gut that twists and twists until they finally visit 2 and 1, where they’re heroes again. It’s only uncomfortable. Cato is used to uncomfortable. It barely registers.

He keeps having to use Clove’s broken little finger to bring her back, but they can fix that easily in the Capitol. Gloves hide the swollen purpleness of it. No one tells either of them to stop it, so it must be okay. They get to take care of each other. Clove gives Cato something to focus on and he gives her reminders to stay calm. 

It also doesn’t occur to him that he’s hurting her. That there might be some world or some time where it would be wrong for him to do this. All he knows is that she needs him, or (when he’s more honest with himself—and he’s never been this self-aware before, and he doesn’t think he likes it, but he has so much time to think that he can’t help it) he needs her to need him. He needs to keep thinking about Clove, because while he’s thinking of her he can’t think about himself. He can’t think about the rest of his life. Every tremor, every migraine, every session of vomiting; these things have become the center of his focus.

Since he isn’t supposed to kill people anymore. 

He wants to. But that, too, goes barely noticed. Cato always wants to hurt people who frustrate him. That hasn’t changed at all. He still shouts when he’s angry and throws his weight around, because why wouldn’t he? Let the escorts flutter and chirp over it. He’s a Victor. He can do almost anything he feels like doing, can’t he? It’s just that killing people unnecessarily is discouraged. He may not care much about his family, but he doesn’t want any of them shot because he lacks self-control. So nobody dies on the tour. 

Cato knows how to kill anyone in any given situation at any given time, like breathing. Why would it be strange now when it never was before?

*

“I’m glad the next time we have to do that we’ll be standing behind the Victors,” Cato complains, flopping gracelessly across Clove’s bed, and she could almost smile. Instead, she stretches out next to him. 

They end up sleeping on the floor. Neither of them are comfortable in cloying softness.

*

“Do you believe in ghosts?” 

“No.”

“I think I died,” she says, “In the Arena.”

Cato is too afraid to say anything to that. He doesn’t believe in ghosts. But he does believe that Clove could be insane. And if she’s insane, what is he? Where is he left if the only person who knows him doesn’t know herself?

So he pulls her close and brushes his fingers over the scars under her hair. Wills her to be sane like he willed her to live. If it worked once, it has to work again. It has to. 

She pushes him away and turns her back to him. 

*

Clove lets Cato watch her throw knives.

She wants to hate him like everyone else. She does hate him a little. She hates his obliviousness, his apparent invulnerability to everything that is so wrong with what they’ve turned into. She hates that his useless brain is fine while she struggles in a fog that, though thin, makes everything so much harder than it used to be. 

But he’s all she has. What would it have been like to do this without him? She can’t imagine being alone and she’s not sure if that’s her injury or the screaming emptiness of what things might be. They fought and bled and killed together. He puts up with her weakness without a word, like it doesn’t even bother him that she’s all but a cripple. She wants to hate him for his pity, but she can’t even do that. 

So she lets him watch her miss, again and again, and it’s the closest she can come to telling him that she cannot do this on her own either.

Remember: this is Victory.


	2. we burn and then we burn again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is _dark_. Forced prostitution, self-harm, Career violence, and the unrelenting horror of surviving the Hunger Games.

This is the secret between them: Clove was always the favorite.

Always was, always will be, as inevitable as gravity or mountains. It wasn’t as if she was the favorite because he was lacking. She just had the flare and unlikeliness he didn’t. It would have told a better story if she had won like any other Victor has. Alone.

But he’s breathing and no one, including Cato, knows precisely how to tell that story. They barely like one another. They’re salted to the roots of affection; nothing is going to grow between them. So Cato (who is not an idiot, no matter what people say; he is strong and smart at the same time, he is doubly blessed, he was only not the favorite by sheer audience preference) tells this story:

He and Clove are perfect together. Separating them in death would be as senseless as cutting off a hand. He didn’t save Clove from death. He saved her from an ignoble death, that’s the important thing. They’re a terrifying engine of destruction together. Why would anyone want to take that apart?

Cato isn’t an idiot. He knows that saying the right things, being the right things, is all that will make their dual survival acceptable. Bred and born for survival, he grins at cameras and tells them all that it’s Clove&Cato, Cato&Clove. They need to live as if they’re one person in two skins. It isn’t like it’s hard to satisfy the Capitol.

She veers off in silent furies he can’t follow; he cannot save her this time, not if she doesn’t save herself.

But he tries. He throws himself back into the Games, where she was his District partner and the beginning, the end of the world. He stands in the skin he wore when they said they could both go home. Clove colors his empty world metallic. He wakes from dreams where she disappears with blood on his teeth. She is gold and blue and the only person who has ever needed him.

*

Clove’s laughter is the most real thing in the world. Outside of rigid formalities for the District, outside of Capitol simpering, outside of all the things they were meant to be—Clove laughs almost soundlessly when she dives into the quarry pool.

In training, all of their time was spent perfecting the motions of Victory. They never talk about themselves. (There was nothing to talk about.) So Cato knows next to nothing about the girl he would kill and kill again for. He just follows her. The thin film of ice on the quarry doesn’t bother him.

She touches him, and she’s hotter than a fever. Her eyes are exactly the color of lapis lazuli. The calluses on her palm are as perfect as anything in the ugly world could be.

Cato doesn’t want to fuck her. (There, that word—fuck, brutal and crude as his hands.) Clove is a razor leaving wakes in silver-flat water. Clove is a winter soul that snow doesn’t melt on. Clove is the only thing that really belongs to him.

He knots her hair in his fist and doesn’t fuck her. 

*

Cato hangs a blue-gold trinket from her neck and leaves Clove wishing she could cut off at least one of his fingers. The necklace is as clumsy and hideous as the rest of his affection; horrifically just as apt. Three crude throwing knives etched along breakable lines in weak stone. She would have expected him to know better, what with having family who did this for a living.

She ties the leather cord high enough to be a choker. 

All of it is Cato, down to its relative fragility versus heaviness. She flashes a skull-naked grin at anyone who questions it. The weight on her neck keeps her grounded. It keeps her from doing anything stupid and brave. Cato, Cato, Cato. She owes something to her District partner until it might be time to kill him. Just because they left the Arena doesn’t mean the Games are over. 

She only has one thing to lose and she doesn’t even like him much. She could do or be anything she wanted up until the point of execution. But lodged in her very bones is the sense that an alliance can only be severed for an advantage. Whether or not you actually enjoy someone’s company is so laughably unimportant it never comes up.

The whisper of chisel over stone is the only truthful thing in her life. 

(She wants to pattern him on her marrow; she wants to etch him into her muscle fiber—)

(It isn’t enough.)

*

Their bodies have been weapons since they were too young to understand what that meant. That’s all the Capitol still asks of them, all their handlers still expect. No one hires District 2 Victors for gentleness. That’s District 1 or 4, or one of the more pliable outer Districts. Every type can be catered to out of the pool of survivors. Everyone has a part to play.

Clove rakes nails dipped in silver down a woman’s chest and spits on her face. Cato chokes the male half of a couple while the female half watches. 

“Happy you won, baby girl?” Johanna taunts, and Clove meets her with flat eyes and blood still on her teeth.

“ _Yes,_ ” she says, because it’s still yes, this doesn’t change anything. Sex isn’t worse than killing seven people. She has no illusions that she is, somehow, better than this. That she was ever anything besides a tool, a toy. A performer. The game may be different now, but it’s still a game, and Clove is still a winner. 

Between engagements she’s taken to cutting open her thighs with her sharpened nails, just to prove she still has some measure of autonomy. They polish all the scars away when she goes back. She is seriously starting to consider slitting her stylist’s throat. 

Clove is happy she won. 

*

“To remind the Districts that the Rebellion tore apart generations, every child in the Quarter Quell will be Reaped with one parent of the opposite sex as their District Partner.”

*

Cato is away from home when this boon descends, a month before the Reaping proper. It gives the Districts time to update their Reaping registries accordingly. He doesn’t hold any illusions that this timing is coincidental—no one in Two believes the Reapings are ever actually random, except in the places where it genuinely doesn’t matter. The Districts where everyone is worth the same amount of nothing add the thrill of variety to the Games, while the important Districts send their best to glory. 

In their home District the trainees whose parents are former trainees themselves are being evaluated. He doesn’t have a doubt that if a suitable duo can’t be found one will be created. Competition for the parental slot is fierce; this is the second chance some of the washouts have been craving their entire lives.

“I think this Quarter Quell will be a great follow up to my year, Faun,” he tells the reporter practically palming him through his tight pants as she rubs his thigh, “It definitely sends a message to the Districts—I think, and this is just me, some of the adults out there get complacent at Reaping time. They have so many children in the outer Districts I don’t even think they notice losing one here or there.”

At the time of the interview, Cato has three younger brothers.

*

He’s still waiting for this to feel like victory, but now he looks around at the other Victors and doesn’t see any signs of it waiting for him. This is an honor, all of this. Being so wanted, so prized. Cato is supposed to accept this as his due.

Clove keeps pulling farther and farther away from him. He thumbs the token at her throat and thinks of snapping her neck, just to keep her as his own. If he’d killed her before all of this she would have been his forever. 

“How was my interview?”

“She couldn’t stop drooling over you. It was disgusting.” Clove pauses in the process of scraping her hair back into two tight braids. “They like you.”

“They could like you too.” 

“I don’t care.”

Cato tightens the choker around her neck in desperation; even when her eyelashes start to flicker she doesn’t fight back. He needs to make her understand, but he knows he could cut her open and rip out her heart without breaking her. 

He doesn’t want her broken. He wants her back. That’s the worst thing.

*

Cato doesn’t mind Finnick Odair. He’s a joke, of course, with his whining and reluctance to do what needs to be done. Could they raise their Careers that ignorant in 4, to think that Victory was the end? Did they even watch television? 

(Cato ignores that he didn’t know it’d mean this, that he thought the lovers and the parties would be a choice he could make—when he thinks back he knows that was foolish, because he was born to serve. He ignores this because he needs his pride.)

Finnick is a joke, but he knows the best bars in the Capitol for any given mood, and he’s not a simpering idiot even if he is a weakling. 

Part of the image Cato’s been told to cultivate is of a (controlled) renegade, that he should grow into the kind of man Brutus is, and not Julian. Julian is cold, but Cato runs hot and furious. They aren’t asking him for much, just a few broken tables and fistfights that are as unsatisfying as they are staged. The things he could actually do with a room full of glass and soft bodies would be art, but—Finnick is helpful in curbing those trained reflexes. So Cato keeps hanging around him.

Once, he’s told to lose a fight with a man whose scarlet-dyed skin almost begs to be split open and redyed properly. He tries to get it over with fast.

“I know,” Finnick whispers, steadying his drunken stagger back to their car, “Oh, kid. I’m sorry.”

“I want Clove,” Cato slurs, (and he won’t remember this in the morning, he’ll see the fight on the news and only vaguely recollect—the scarlet man is some kind of Peacekeeper aiming for a promotion, older and more experienced by twenty years and Cato could have killed him eighteen different ways in twenty seconds), “I want—I want another drink.”

He wakes up in his bed, showered and clothed from neck to toe. Finnick is sprawled on the other side of the enormous mattress, staring at the ceiling.

“If we had sex,” Cato says, blearily, “I expect you to buy me a sword.”

“Oh, fuck, Cato.” Finnick screws his eyes shut and rolls away, off the bed. “No. We didn’t.”

“Too bad.” Cato flattens a pillow over his throbbing head, wonders if this is how Clove feels all the time. He wants to take a drill to his temple. “I could use a new sword.”

*

The first unspoken rule of the centre was that some rules have to remain unspoken. They don’t talk about how they feel, about what this is doing to them day after day. Where there may have once been the capacity to speak is a lacuna they slip through without touching the sides.

Clove breaks Cato’s nose, slices his cheek to the bone, and rubs dirt into the wound. Remaking takes three days, three days she covers for him, because they’re tucked into the Capitol’s sheets now. 

She has to find her centre of gravity again before she spirals out of control completely. No one can help her with that. The other Victors all seem to live somewhere other than reality—Enobaria is full of cheap serpentine tricks, Brutus has let years untrained make him an idiot, Lyme is buried in her work like a landslide. Fresh meat is expected to find its own way. Clove has never relied on anyone else.

Except that’s not true. She has, she does. 

They share an apartment in the Capitol because they’re a duo, a matched set, and they need to keep telling the world that. 

“They’re going to expect us to do this together eventually,” she tells him, one night after an engagement when he’s joined her in the shower still wearing all his clothes. She leans back against his chest and lets the falling water sluice over her still-small breasts. They considered surgery, but ultimately decided part of her appeal was her slimness. The way she could pass for fourteen, or younger. Cato’s fingertips squeak on the shower floor as he looks away from her.

“We could wait until then.” He doesn’t protest as she turns around and straddles his lap, but he stays focused on some distant point in the bathroom. They’re making a mess as water scatters out of the open shower door. The air is automatically warming itself to keep their wet hair from chilling.

“It’s smarter to practice.” Her fingers are deft on both hands, which is something he doesn’t have, so. Point to her. All she undoes is his pants. “But it’s your choice.”

She whispers that into his ear. It must look like affection, to whoever’s watching them. As if Clove was ever that kind of person. As if what she thinks this close to his vulnerable throat is anything but how she could rip it open. 

(It would be kinder than this. Clove is not kind.)

“Fine.” He twists until their foreheads are touching and presses up against her hand, lets her shimmy his pants down far enough and no farther. She’s still sore and bruised, but it’s not important—she’s been hurt much worse than this and done harder things. 

It’s not awful. It’s not good, either. It just is. Perfunctory and brief. People will expect them to be violent, she’s sure, but they have violence mastered between each other already. He comes, she doesn’t.

The only thing that means anything is that when he tries to pull away she drapes the arms she was bracing against the wall around his shoulders and holds tight, tilting her pelvis to keep him a little longer. He tenses, briefly, then relaxes. Cato rests his broad left hand on the small of her back and Clove hides her face against his chest.

“Don’t leave me,” he breathes, quiet enough that the shower should make it unintelligible. 

She won’t answer.

*

They go back a week before the Reaping. Clove asks to review the chosen Volunteers.

One of the funny things about all of this is that she still looks down, reflexively, and says sir when she asks the centre to give her things. Being a trainee hasn’t left her yet, and it twists her face into a lemon rind bitter smile.

Octavian and his mother Scipia are an excellent pairing. Scipia is a trainer at one of the rural centres, while Octavian was already being prepped as a likely candidate for this year. On paper, in their pictures, they look ideal.

Clove has to make sure that one of them dies, so there can be no chance they live together. Octavian has curly brown hair and an arrogant smile. Scipia looks much younger than she is, tall and lithe. One of them has to die halfway or earlier. 

She thinks she might be going soft.

*

Whoever Hazelle and Gale Hawthorne are, Clove doesn’t envy them. District 12 is going to suffer this year. She’s heard rumors of whipping posts and crackdowns. The pathetic crowd at the Reaping is even more starved looking than usual. Gale Hawthorne takes the stage with burning eyes and a limp. His mother sheds a mess of children as she follows.

Cato said they must not even miss their children. That’s why they breed like drugged rabbits out there. What was that woman thinking? There’s no father that appears to round the children up, just a pale and pinched looking woman who can obviously barely take care of herself. 

She doesn’t feel sorry for them. They’re better off dead in that District, as far as she’s concerned. They won’t have to wait to have their lives snatched from them in any way more complicated than starvation. If anyone there had any sense they’d drown them like a litter of unwanted kittens. 

The crying gives her a headache.

*

Technically, each Tribute has one Mentor. In practice, District 2 always sends at least two, and the newest Victor always goes along to the Games. With a Quarter Quell and an unprecedented double triumph last year they end up sending six—two official Mentors, two unofficial ones, and the Victors of the 74th Hunger Games.

“Remember,” Julian tells Cato, in a low, controlled voice, “You were an exception. Not the new rule.”

There’s going to be a new Victor to focus on soon. They’re planning for it to be Octavian, which would be unfair to the more talented Scipia except that she brought it up independently. That means that as far as public relations go it’s better to establish distance somewhere in the midst of Cato&Clove. It’s especially important with this Quell, because every District pair has a built in partnership. It opens up comparisons that make the Capitol uncomfortable.

Not the frivolous Capitol--which is not frivolous underneath the spun candy veneer; it’s riddled with infighting and avarice, but those are still trivialities compared to real power. The Capitol that matters wants him to push Clove away. He has a bouquet of white roses to remind him.

They smell like blood (and glory).

Cato grins at camera after camera, flawless and broad. The new story is telling them all to forget. To look forward instead of back, to let the drama of the Quarter Quell rivet all attention to what’s coming—he barely knows what he’s saying half of the time, but it seems to be the right thing, because he continues to have three younger brothers. 

He continues to have Clove. 

The two of them sleep in the same bed in their blood-colored Capitol quarters. They’ve learned to sleep under blankets and on top of miraculous shape-holding foam, but only together. She fits tightly against his chest, her knives fanned out in front of both of them, while the arm he cushions his head with ends in a fist. They slept like this in the Arena, when it came down to the two of them. It’s not—comforting. It’s practical. Cato doesn’t need comforting and neither does Clove, because they’re stronger than that.

He doesn’t think about what they did, usually. It isn’t like it was some revelation for either of them. All she did was bring up something they needed to deal with. Now that it’s dealt with it should be forgotten until it becomes necessary to remember.

(The only romance he’s ever found believable face-to-face was the District 12 boy flinching when they taunted him about his Girl on Fire. Cato’s thoughts stray, again and again, to what it would have been like for those two to be together. What the 12s might have had to say to each other; if it would have been better than silence.)

Whenever he starts contemplating saying what he thinks, and not what he should, Clove grounds him. It’s entirely probable that if he was a better person he’d think of his family before her, but his family also knew what they were doing when they gave their two oldest to the Training Centre. Only an idiot would expect much to come back from there, Victor or not. 

But then again: if he was only what the Training Centre made him he wouldn’t think of Clove, he’d think of what’s best for Panem. For the Capitol, for the District. Cato always scored highest in his age range on loyalty. 

Something changed him in that Arena. She got under his nails and stuck there. 

When he sleeps with her the nights are untroubled and long.

*

The Capitol is exactly the same as it was when they left. Clove remembers thinking she’d stride into the city like an ancient conqueror. Instead she comes like one of the broken barbarians they’d chain behind them. The Capitol is the one with the keys and the swords, not her.

Her medication usually works now. That’s a small thing to appreciate. When the headaches come she knows to plunge her head into ice water, if she can, and to grind her teeth, if she can’t. She split a back molar a while ago, one of the artificial ones they fitted her with in Remaking. Her hand-eye coordination is almost what it used to be, because she won’t stop until she’s torn that back out of the fog. There are very few things Clove considers essential, which make them all the more precious.

Luster and Lace form another mother-son pair, while Fiona and Leodan make father-daughter, and Clove is sick just looking at them. The Career pack is assembling before the rest of the Tributes are even done Remaking. In a way, this Quell is a good thing, because the parents push their children into an alliance 1 and 4 would have spurned otherwise. District 2 had just been too much, last year. 

That’s her fault, apparently. Clove would have raged last year at being pushed to the sidelines—she did, she hated Katniss Everdeen the moment she saw her drab little sneer in flames—but this year she values being temporarily forgotten. President Snow may have called her a good girl, the Gamemaker who let her and Cato live might be the one who had to die for his mistake, but with a Quell like this and Victors like last year’s she knows someone is going to ask why another exception can’t be made. 

She may be asking herself that, in a strange, disconnected kind of way. As if the question is academic. (But academic questions are the most dangerous, because they’re the most thoughtful.)

The reason why is:

The stylist for Twelve once again destroys the rest of the Tribute Parade, knocking aside 2’s brilliant silver blades and 1’s swirling constellations (the theme is stark, this year, a brutal return to basics) with something so bafflingly outrageous Clove claps her hands over her mouth and leans hard against Cato. 

Gale and Hazelle Hawthorne are charred mockingjays, ash smeared over their cheekbones and into their short, upswept hairstyles, black and white bodysuits arrayed with feathers. They look straight ahead, ignoring the roaring crowd, hands clasped tightly, as if the whole Capitol is beneath their notice. Clove shakes.

She’s laughing, not horrified. The two reactions understandably look more or less the same.

*

“I want to buy your stylist something nice,” Clove tells Abernathy, reckless and high on defiance, because if some nothing stylist can mock the Capitol right in its heart anything must be possible. “How does he take his poison? Fast or slow?”

“Aren’t we chatty,” Abernathy mumbles, sinking deeper into his chair in the dive she tracked him to. She’d forgotten exactly how good she was, how much blood in the water turned her magnetic and fascinating, fascinated. The blurriness the world usually hides behind is gone tonight; she could destroy everyone in this bar blindfolded, she knows it. 

“Are you still _angry?_ Is that what this is? That we took away the only chance you’d ever have to see another Victor in—”

“Not with you, sweetheart.”

Clove walks out before he can say anything else she’ll regret.

*

“Don’t bother with 12,” Clove tells Octavian, digging her nails into his arm hard enough to draw blood, and he looks at her with Centre-perfected calm. “I mean it. Don’t dignify what they’re trying to do. You don’t want to get involved.”

“I already am.” He cocks his head like a bird and pries her fingers loose. “I’m going to die this year, because of you. But I’m going to die well. You don’t get to choose that for me.”

“No one dies well,” Clove tells him, and it hurts to tell the truth, but what else is she supposed to do? What else does she have to give this dead boy walking? It hurts him too. She can read it in the way he doesn’t flinch, he doesn’t react. He just exits the situation.

Scipia was the one who locked Clove in the isolation chamber when she was six and cried for the first and last time at the Centre. Clove doesn’t waste her time trying to warn her. If she doesn’t understand already she never will.

She forgets that someone is always listening.

*

Cato knows what this is as soon as he sees Clove wearing a single braid and grey contacts. 

They sit stiffly next to one another on the edge of the bed as the Capitol woman with ivy painted all the way from her neck to her ankles pouts in her plush sitting chair, one bare foot tucked underneath her.

“Why aren’t you smiling? Katniss, smile. You’re so pretty when you smile.”

Clove shakes next to him. She’s not laughing.

*

“I _hate—_ ”

“Clove.”

“Not you, Cato.”

“I know,” he says, and wonders if he'll ever see his family again.  
*

“Whatever you’re doing,” she tells Abernathy, slow and steady, pressing a fork against the soft skin of his bare throat, “I want in.”

*

It’s not because she’s humiliated. It’s because this is never going to stop unless she makes it stop, and Clove is exhausted. She has been living this way for eighteen years. Her life has already been given completely to people she actively despises, cowards and manipulators whose only claim to power is that they can order people like her the way they like. Put her and President Snow in a sealed room with one knife. See who walks away.

Clove used to believe with passion and intensity. They scraped that out of her well before Thresh’s rock kissed her blind, when they gave the world to someone who didn’t deserve it. They changed the rules and made every rule meaningless.

If Katniss Everdeen hadn’t stolen her year, Clove wouldn’t be doing this. But they betrayed her first. They broke what should have been her heart, and now they’re all going to suffer.

Betrayal meets with death. That’s the law of the Games.

*

District 2 breeds winners. That’s the key to their success. It wasn’t that they made killers, because anyone can make a killer. They made Victors, year after year: children for whom the concept of surrender was impossible, immoral.

District 2 breeds idealists. It is, generally speaking, a bad idea to disillusion idealists. 

Cato is just glad to have something to die for again that doesn’t make him sick. Clove twined her tiny fingers around his ruined hand and whispered a story about getting them back, and he’d go anywhere she ever asked him to follow. It’s not about freedom, because he couldn’t describe that if he tried, and it’s not about morality, because Cato hews closer to sociopathy and instability than even his trainers liked. But revenge? That’s a concept he can stand behind.

“Why Hawthorne?” He asks, when they’re alone, and he’s watching her with liquid fascination low in his gut as she flips a knife with her old fearless grin. 

“I don’t care. As long as I don’t have to be on camera. Or, well, Abernathy says he’s symbolic. ‘Continued Capitol cruelty’, apparently.” She laughs, tossing her hair over her shoulder and twirling the blade through her fingers, and she is still the most blazingly beautiful thing he’s ever seen. “I just can’t wait to kill someone.”

“All of them,” he promises, hungry and elated, pressing closer to her in this bar that’s apparently the only unbugged part of the Capitol (for this week; they move it, Beetee said, but Cato only listened to enough of what he was saying to note the address), “We’ll kill every last one of them.”

Clove slides fluidly to straddling his lap, hidden from the rest of the place in their booth only by a little smoked glass, and she teases his jaw with the flat of her knife, then the tip. He brings a hand up to her throat and wraps his fingers around it, thumbing the token she’s still wearing after all they’ve been through. She still believes in him, after everything. She’s bringing him with her all the way to Hell.

“Promise me,” she breathes, her gold-streaked eyes locked to his, “Say it.”

“We’re going to burn them down,” he promises, tipping his forehead to touch hers, “You and me.”

“You and me.” Clove nuzzles his throat, scrapes her teeth across his skin. He tips his head back and shivers, squeezing his fingers tight.

This is the secret he keeps for himself: Clove has always been his favorite.


End file.
